Christine Cynn and Kim F. Hall,
"Introduction"
(page 3 of 5)
The pieces in the second section, "The Politics of Citizenship/The
Performance of Politics," suggest reconsiderations of notions of
affinity and belonging, not in terms of home and nation but in terms of
political alliance. Unexpectedly, conceptions of motherhood become
important in several of the pieces, the majority of which reflect the
voices of noted political thinkers, writers, and artists in the U.S. and
West Africa. This volume was produced during the academic year
2008-2009, in an historic election cycle that potentially ushers in a
new phase of U.S. politics but certainly tapped long standing pressure
points regarding race and culture in the U.S., even as popular
commentary seemed to forget that race and gender have long been primal
to conceptions of citizenship and nativity.
The contest in the presidential primaries of the Democratic Party
between the first viable female candidate and the most successful
African-American presidential candidate in history at times threatened
to reduce American political options to a choice between "race" and
"gender." Given that commentary on the election (falsely) pitted race
against gender in ways not discussed so widely since the conflicts over
white women's suffrage and black male suffrage after abolition, we were
compelled to offer some analysis of this political moment, even though
it is yet early to appreciate the many ways this contest and Obama
himself might impact conceptions of race and diaspora. The election of
the first African-American president in the United States raised several
questions about the politics of race and the nature of diaspora. The
Barnard Center for Research on Women was fortunate to host two leading
black feminists during the election year; this section leads with
lectures by Lani Guinier and
Angela Davis that address U.S. politics,
along with an essay by Tavia Nyong'o on Obama himself.
The Davis and Guinier lectures insist that one always remains
vigilant for the power of narrative to occlude concerns of class,
sexuality, and gender, as well as the histories and experiences of women
in the diaspora. Drawing from her mother's question, "Who designed the
game?" at a family gathering, Lani Guinier's lecture "Race, Gender and
Votes," given on the Barnard campus in March 2008 in the midst of the
presidential primary season, argues for a reconceptualization of power
that would reorganize electoral politics. She highlights how performance
in Theater of the Oppressed in Brazil and the Montgomery Bus Boycott
allowed activists to motivate and set the agenda for designated
political leaders. However, she also points out that narratives of
leadership mislead and efface collective action, arguing, for example,
that popular narratives of Martin Luther King, Jr., as leader of the
Civil Rights Movement, and Rosa Parks, whose famous refusal to sit in
the back of the bus sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, "miss the
important role that women activists played in the Montgomery Bus
Boycott." Like the Latin American feminist activists in Keisha-Khan
Perry's essay (Section III), who continually place themselves in
relation to anti racist, anti-sexist activism throughout the diaspora,
Guinier argues strongly for global connections between social movements,
as well as a horizontal conceptualization of power between leaders and
members/masses.
In his reading of Obama's autobiography, Dreams of My Father,
Tavia Nyong'o offers to think through what it means to understand Obama
as our first "post-colonial" president. Using a psychoanalytic
framework, Nyong'o interrogates the roles of family both in Obama's
performance of black male subjectivity and in American notions of
citizenship and nation. Nyong'o notes that "Obama's text seeks to
interpret the non-relation between symbolic fathers who order American
discourse of race and inheritance, and his imaginary father, the
fatherly Imago, whose absence from his American (and Indonesian)
upbringing indexes instead a mythic, exteriorized, Kenyan concern."
Nyong'o, however, dwells more on the paradox that "the parent Obama
consistently seeks to understand is his mother"; using Hortense J.
Spiller's landmark "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe" and Harriet Jacob's
Our Nig, he queries where the white mother fits into "the cut and
augmented hermeneutic circle of blackness." This question of the white
woman's role is unexpectedly foundational in a discussion of the African
diaspora. Critic Michelle Wright highlights the prominent use of white
women to represent the nation in coming-to-black-consciousness anecdotes
by Cesaire, Dubois, Fanon, and Senghor; such narratives of personal
encounter feature a rejection by white women and girls as "emblematic of
the Black man's position in the West" (127). Nyong'o's reading suggests
how the Obama narrative upends this script, offering instead key moments
of acceptance (and creation) of African otherness by white women; he
also notes the problematic erasure of black women in this narrative.
Angela Davis's lecture, "Abolition, Democracy and Global Politics,"
given the week before the general election, both captures the excitement
of possibility in an Obama win and warns that consideration of
gendered/raced issues (such as prison policy and civil rights for
transgendered people) are likely to be buried under the focus on the
"triumph" of the election. She argues that we should claim Obama's
candidacy as a "victory of masses of people," and she stirringly evokes
Dubois's calling the moment of emancipation "the coming of the Lord" to
characterize the emotion that would accompany Obama's election.
Nonetheless, Davis reminds listeners that the focus on Obama's
importance in American history occludes the social movements and
individual black women whose political activities laid the foundation
for an Obama win. Both Fannie Lou Hamer and Shirley Chisholm entered
electoral politics insisting on the inseparability of class, race,
gender, and citizenship concerns. Davis contends that the obscuring of
these issues during Obama's campaign merely amplified popular
misapprehensions of citizenship and belonging: there was "little or no
public discourse on some of the most important issues affecting us. . . .
When issues of race emerge, they produce a sense of chaos, of tumbling
into a black hole of history from which we will never emerge."
Similarly, fetishizing "Civil Rights as producing freedom," with Obama
as the movement's apotheosis, rests on a "troubled" notion of
citizenship that considers some (undocumented immigrants, ex-felons, and
many racialized communities and sexual minorities) as beyond the reach
of citizenship.
A key issue for the study of gender in the African diaspora is the
privileging of the male subject of diaspora: so too, as Paul Zeleza
observes, "there is an analytic tendency to privilege understanding of
African diaspora as defined through the Anglophone Atlantic, American
African diaspora" (36). To counter such tendencies, we chose to
highlight contrasting perspectives from two of West Africa's most
prominent writers and artists, Ama Ata Aidoo and Werewere Liking. In her
interview with Nafeesah Allen, author Ama Aidoo declines to rehash the
old controversies between "Western Feminism" and "Third World Feminism"
but reiterates that Western models cannot be simply mapped onto Africa:
"Well, I'm too tired to speak to that controversy, because it's
something that I'm interested in, that I've been confronted with, but it
takes too much to explain. I don't believe in Western Feminism in
Africa. It's like saying, what's the difference between African
Christians and Western Christians, there is no difference."
Nevertheless, Aidoo identifies strongly as a feminist and insists that
feminism must not rely on maternalism: "I believe, as a feminist, that
motherhood is important, very important. But that a woman's worth, a
woman's life, can still be valid, productive, interesting outside of
motherhood. What I don't believe is that if a woman doesn't have
children then it's like she might as well not have been born. That's
mad. I repudiate it completely." As Aidoo observes, Europeans
transported a large proportion of enslaved people from slave sites along
the so-called Gold Coast, and, as a result, Ghana retains particular
importance for the African diaspora. Even still, Aidoo pointedly rejects
as "patronizing" the conception of Africa as "homeland" and insists on
the specificity of her location within "the State of Ghana": "If you ask
where home is I can point to a specific area in south central Ghana
where I was born and where I spent my formative years."
In contrast to Aidoo, artist/author Werewere Liking, in her interview
with Christine Cynn, centers motherhood as the source of female
authority and rejects what she describes as a certain Western protest
feminism of the late 1960s and 70s. As Liking states, African women as
mothers and creators play a central role in imparting counterhistories
and educating African youth about the history and culture of the
continent. Through her wide-ranging aesthetic productions and Ki-Yi
village, the pan-African cultural center that she co-founded in Abidjan,
Côte d'Ivoire, she seeks to enable and enact such revisionings of
Africa. Her definition of "Pan-African," a term that she notes Africans
living in the diaspora formulated at the turn of the twentieth century,
encompasses both Africa and its diasporas in a reciprocal relation that
traverses national borders. However, as she insists, pan-Africanism
"does not negate cultural specificities. Indeed, Pan-Africanism relies
on these specificities to enrich itself. Therefore, for me, to be
Pan-African means to take a wider view." Liking draws attention to an
underanalyzed aspect of the diaspora, extensive intra-African migration,
in this case to Côte d'Ivoire. She dismisses as "temporary," and
"epiphenomenon" the ethno-nationalism articulated as "Ivoirite" that
emerged after the death of president Felix Houpouet-Boigny in 1993 and
that she considers a legacy of colonialism and neocolonialism.
Makini Boothe's "A Reunion of 'Sisters': Personal Reflections on
Diaspora and Women in Activist Discourse," provides a seldom seen
perspective: that of a young U.S. black American woman who strongly
identifies as a diasporic subject. As she comes to term with her
experiences attending an NGO-sponsored training institute for young,
mostly women, activists across the African diaspora—and with her own
status as an outsider living within and benefiting from citizenship in a
powerful nation—she assesses the unforeseen limits of organizing around
the terms "diaspora" and "woman." Addressing the collision of theory
and activism, she finds that "diaspora" has "an ambiguous definition in
activist discourse": the working idea of African diaspora arising from
both the conference and institutions such as the African Union and the
World Bank carries different assumptions, relationships, and
responsibilities than definitions she learned and accepted as an
African-American shaped by a Middle Passage framework. From the
Institute emerged an independent diaspora activist network, Sauti
Yeti (Our Voices). With unprecedented access to new technologies
that help keep these women working together across the globe, they face
ongoing questions: How do we collaborate transnationally around local
needs/efforts? How do we make diasporic differences and disagreement a
source of strength?
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